Birdsboro woman wanted on bench warrants found with heroin

NORRISTOWN — A Birdsboro woman wanted on five separate bench warrants in Montgomery County was found in Boyertown with seven bundles of heroin, according to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office.

Sgt. Joanne Plasterer of the sheriff’s department said Tuesday that deputies in the warrants’ division were searching for Ashley Diener, 24, on Aug. 28 and had received information that she was in a home on the first block of Long Lane Road in Boyertown.

The four deputies made contact with a male who answered the door and told deputies Diener was in a room on the second floor where deputies then secured her and searched her, according to Plasterer.

A female deputy searched Diener and noticed a small, blue plastic baggie with a “powdery substance in her bra,” Plasterer said.

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After searching Diener, the deputy recovered seven bundles of the same blue plastic bag with a powdery substance in Diener’s underwear.

Plasterer said each bundle held seven to 20 small plastic bags of suspected heroin.

“The Pennsylvania State Police, Reading barracks, were called and responded to the scene and took custody of the drugs,” Plasterer said.

Cash totaling $650 was also taken by state police as evidence.

State police will be charging Diener for the drugs, Plasterer said. However, Diener was taken to Montgomery County Correctional Facility to be held for the bench warrants for different parole violations.

A press officer from the Reading Barracks of the Pennsylvania State Police was not immediately available for comment on Tuesday.

“This was a great job by the warrants’ division,” Montgomery County Sheriff Russell Bono said. “What it points out is the importance of having female deputies. We run into these situations on a daily basis and we’re fortunate here — in the department — to have more than one female deputy. I will continue to try to balance out the department along, not only racial, but on a gender basis. It’s very important that happens.”

Bono said male deputies would have been legally able to search the woman if the female deputy was unavailable, however, it would have been “not advisable.”

Plasterer, who is in charge of the warrants’ division, said if a female officer is not available for an in depth search, one of the male officers would have done a preliminary search. She said he could use a baton or the back of his hand to search for weapons.

“They have to search for weapons. They’re not going to place someone into custody and put them in a car without giving that search for their own safety. Then they would transport and bring (the defendant) right to a female officer; the closest one possible,” Plasterer said. “Or they would call one of us up to the scene.”

Bono said Thursday’s arrest speaks to the larger heroin problem in Pennsylvania.

“The drugs were identified, at least preliminarily, as heroin. There is a national rise is the sale and use of heroin along with a national rise in deaths due to overdose of heroin,” Bono said. “In fact in the last five years there have been over 3,000 heroin deaths in Pennsylvania.”

Bono said the deputies in the sheriff’s department are aware of the heroin epidemic.